Editorial: Hit smokers in wallet to send powerful message

Thirty-seven years after the American Cancer Society staged its first Great American Smokeout to help smokers kick the habit, one in five adults still light up. Nineteen percent of adults in Delaware County are among them.

Thatís one percent more than the average for southeastern Pennsylvania according to a survey by the Public Health management Corporation Center for Data Innovation. Philadelphia is the only county in the region that beats Delaware County for smokers with 23 percent of its residents engaged in the nasty habit.

Bucks County follows with 16 percent. Thirteen percent of the adults in both Chester and Montgomery counties still indulge in the single largest preventable cause of disease and premature death in the United States.

When it started in 1976 and for a good twenty years thereafter, the Great American Smokeout was an occasion for colorful reminders of the grim consequences of smoking and creative approaches for getting people to quit.

Businesses, hospitals and community groups would try to outdo one another in finding clever ways to keep people from smoking for a day with the hope they would never take another puff.

They would offer carrot sticks, candy and other placeboes to help address the oral fixation of those who fancied cigarettes. Even adverse conditioning was employed, with smokers slipping rubber bands around their wrists so they could give themselves stinging snaps when the urge to light up overcame them. It wasnít unusual to find a faux coffin at the center of a shopping mall where smokers were urged to deposit their boxes of butts. School children staged ant-smoking rallies.

In recent years, the Great American Smokeout has come and gone almost unnoticed. Part of the reason is because American Cancer Society chapters have consolidated and there is less organizing of events at local levels. There also isnít as much ado because states such as Delaware and cities such as Philadelphia have banned smoking in public places.

Nevertheless, the smokeout has been effective. Since the release of the first U.S. Surgeon Generalís report on the hazardous health effects of smoking in 1964, smoking in the country has dramatically declined, but 21.6 percent of American men and 16.5 percent of American women still smoked in 2011.

Nearly 44 million American smoke cigarettes. Tobacco use accounts for nearly one in five deaths in the United States each year, at least 30 percent of all cancer deaths and 80 percent of lung cancer deaths. Tobacco use is also associated with at least 16 other forms of cancer.

Not only do smokers suffer health-wise from their habit, an estimated 600,000 people die annually worldwide as a result of exposure to secondhand smoke. It is responsible for between 150,000 and 300,000 lower respiratory tract infections in U.S. children under age 18 months each year. It worsens asthma-related problems in up to 1 million children.

Smoking not only is hazardous to Americansí health, it is hazardous to their pocketbooks. Smoking caused more than $193 billion in annual health-related costs in the United States including medical costs and productivity losses between 2000 and 2004. The estimated cost of secondhand smoke because of medical care, illness and death is more than $10 billion each year.

While various smoking cessation programs are available through the American Cancer Society and the Southeastern Pennsylvania Tobacco Control Project, Diane Phillips, senior director of state policy for the Cancer Action Network, the advocacy arm of the American Cancer Society, has suggested a more grass- roots approach to the problem. She would like to see Pennsylvania legislators use the Great American Smokeout Thursday as an occasion to increase the cigarette tax by $1. It would generate an estimated $365.43 million in revenue for the state the first year, fill gaps in tobacco prevention funding left by the recent arbitration ruling on the master settlement agreement and eventually reduce long-term health care costs by more than $3.11 billion.

Most importantly, the increased cigarette tax could save an estimated 48,800 lives.

We like Phillipsí approach to kicking the habit. Smokers or those considering smoking may not readily understand the physical pain caused by the deadly habit, but the pain of parting with another dollar just may bring that message home.